Responding to COVID-19 in Latin American Prisons: The Cases of Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze how prison systems in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico respond to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). It explores the challenges these institutions face, the actions taken, the beneficiaries from such measures, and their immediate effect. We argue that governments and prison authorities struggle to put in place comprehensive measures to prevent and control the spread of COVID-19 within these institutions and that more concrete and swift actions are needed to address the magnitude and the consequences of the pandemic. This paper uses both primary and secondary data to describe the current prison situation and analyze institutional responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in these countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Prisons
• Latin America
• COVID-19
• Pandemic
• Alternatives to incarceration
• Early release mechanisms
• Prison reform

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all the local correctional practitioners and scholars who helped the authors gather accurate and recent information about responses to COVID-19 in each country. We are also thankful for the anonymous reviewers and the journal editors for their valuable suggestions and thoughtful feedback on this article.

Disclosure statement

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brasil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Republica Dominicana, Uruguay and Venezuela.

2. For the case of Mexico, we focus on the Mexican federal prison system and the State of Mexico (which is the most populous state and where Mexico City is located). Similarly, in Argentina, we focus on the federal and the Buenos Aires Province prison systems (one or the largest state and where the capital of the country is located).

3. There was one local informant per prison system. Informants were selected by the leaders of the survey based on academic or public service trajectory. All informants are scholars specialized in correctional issues.

4. In general, data on COVID-19 (e.g., confirmed cases and deaths in the community and in correctional systems, as well as, prison releases) is scattered across multiple sources, it is often not publicly available or regularly updated. In particular, data from state-level prison systems in Mexico and Argentina was difficult to gather. We report the most up-to-date information that we were able to collect until the manuscript was submitted for publication.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.